Give it a shape
Today's goal: Organise any answer into three labelled parts.
Yesterday you fixed the first sentence. Today you organise what comes after it. A listener cannot look back up the page, so they need you to tell them the structure.
The most useful all-purpose shape has three parts: what, so what, now what. What happened or what you think; why it matters to this listener; what happens next or what you need.
“We finished the new search, it uses a different index now, it took a while because of the language support, there are some things we still want to improve, anyway it's live since yesterday.”
“The new search went live yesterday. That's the what. Why it matters: customers now find products with spelling mistakes in the query, which was our top complaint last quarter. What's next: we watch the numbers for two weeks, and then the old search is switched off on the 15th.”
Signposts you can use
- “Three things: …”, and then give exactly three.
- “First… Second… Finally…”
- “Why this matters: …”
- “What happens next: …”
Today's exercise (10 minutes)
- Step 1
Choose something you or your team recently finished.
- Step 2
Write three words on paper: what, so what, now what.
- Step 3
Record a 60-second announcement following those three parts, with a spoken signpost before each.
- Step 4
Read the transcript. Could someone draw a line where each part begins? Record again if they could not.